Telefilm Canada: The Impacts Remain Difficult to Evaluate

In 2011–2012 Tele­film received $105.7 mil­lion from the Her­itage Depart­ment. For 2012–2013, their bud­get will be cut $10.6 mil­lion over 3 years, a reduc­tion of 10%.

Since last sum­mer, the gov­ern­ment has been telling agen­cies that they will need to cut 5–10% from their bud­gets. If observers weren’t sur­prised by the cuts to CBC – they were announced and expected from many mem­bers of gov­ern­ment – the cuts to Tele­film and NFB caused a bit more sur­prise. Some have won­dered if the other audio-visual agen­cies were cut to make the cuts to CBC seem less isolated.

Dur­ing an inter­view with George Stroum­boulopou­los aired on CBC on the 10^th of April, the Her­itage Min­is­ter James Moore par­tially responded to the ques­tions say­ing, “Tele­film and the NFB for exam­ple have embraced dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies in ways that were never fore­seen and they’ve had a phe­nom­e­nal suc­cess as a con­se­quence of that and they can actu­ally do with a lit­tle less and they’ll be fine.”

The Media Fund will remain intact (after a num­ber of changes) but it is a public/private part­ner­ship model which the gov­ern­ment favours. In Annexe 1 of the bud­get plan the Her­itage Depart­ment show its true colours say­ing, “The Depart­ment will also focus on fund­ing that lever­ages con­tri­bu­tions from partners.”

From that point of view one might think that Tele­film would have got­ten off eas­ier. On the 2^nd of March the agency had announced the cre­ation on a pri­vate dona­tion fund with the sup­port of the Cana­dian Cham­ber of Com­merce. With this pro­gram con­tri­bu­tions are con­sid­ered “dona­tions to Canada” for tax pur­poses, which means that cor­po­rate donors receive a tax deduc­tion and indi­vid­ual donors receive a tax credit. Tele­film esti­mates that at max­i­mum capac­ity the fund could con­tribute $5 mil­lion to their annual bud­get. Cer­tainly this is a small amount, but the idea behind the pro­gram is diver­si­fi­ca­tion of rev­enue streams and should please the Min­is­ter. In any case this is a fund, not a panacea. Last week, they accepted the fund in the con­text of a ben­e­fits pack­age in trans­ac­tions, per­haps it will man­age to make up, at least in part, the slow­down in production.

Addi­tion­ally Tele­film seems to be deliv­er­ing, at least in part, the mer­chan­dise. Two films that were sup­ported by the agency were nom­i­nated for Oscars; Cro­nen­berg (father and son) and Dolan will be in Cannes; and Min­is­ter Moore has been orga­niz­ing well attended Movie nights in Ottawa to show­case Cana­dian films. It’s true that the mar­ket share tar­gets estab­lished a few years ago have not been reached, in the case of English-language films in par­tic­u­lar. And returns on invest­ment are still awaited.

That being said, where do we cut? In a press release for April 11^th, Tele­film announced reduc­tions of $1 mil­lion to admin­is­tra­tion and $1.7 mil­lion to programs.

Fund­ing for devel­op­ment will be cut by $700 thou­sand and there will be a reduc­tion of $500 thou­sand to train­ing and events ini­tia­tives. Finally sup­port for fea­ture length doc­u­men­taries has been cut in half by $500 thou­sand, how­ever Tele­film is con­fi­dent that they can raise that amount by other means.

Will there be fewer films pro­duced next year? Many believe that despite the efforts of the agency to keep from cut­ting fea­ture length fic­tion, there will be fewer produced.

Some observers believe that pro­duc­ers in Que­bec which invests sub­stan­tially in equity for Que­bec fea­ture films, may fare bet­ter than pro­duc­ers in other provinces. In fact this could be ben­e­fi­cial, due to the lever­age of invest­ment from SODEC and the suc­cess of Que­bec cin­ema, but this has its limits.

In con­trast, the more timid provinces when it comes to invest­ment will be the big losers in these cuts. And that’s where these cuts hurts. As we know, Saskatchewan is elim­i­nat­ing their tax credit for audio­vi­sual pro­duc­tions, and BC by not increas­ing, is los­ing ground to Ontario and Que­bec. How­ever freezes and cuts to Tele­film risks seri­ous harm to this industry.

Few alter­na­tives present them­selves in these provinces, unless co-production in emerg­ing coun­tries mate­ri­al­izes. It has been years that we have been in talks but lit­tle progress has been made on the sig­na­ture of a treaty with India for exam­ple. How­ever if co-production could help our Eng­lish lan­guage pro­duc­ers, we doubt that it could bal­ance out the losses incurred.